It was one of those ones that… when Thom brought ‘The Gloaming’ into the… and we heard it on a CD that he presented us with a load of material, before we even started. But it was one of the few tracks, that came from, you know, essentially a laptop.

And strangely it was actually put together without computers. It’s all done from, don’t wanna get overly technical, but it was done with pieces of tape. So the rhythms you’re hearing are in a way quite mechanical. So that’s why it’s so unsettling maybe.

— Jonny, 2003, HTTT Interview CD (cf. supra)

Thom va ensuite récupérer la piste et se l’écouter en voiture :

Musically that was born out of an experiment that Jonny started, where he wanted to cut… he did it with tape loop. And he wanted to cut it as… on a record, you know, as a locked groove. You know what a locked groove is… so you put one on and rather than the record going to the middle it just stays where it is. And so he sat down with Graeme Stewart, who is another engineer we work with, and basically figured it out. And they… I don’t know what he was gonna use it for, really, but I heard it when he and Colin started working on it, and just thought it was the most amazing thing, that Jonny had ever written. And I just said ’I’ll have that’… and took the hard disc away and… used to drive ’round down country roads during dusk, basically, or the gloaming, listening to this thing, and had this melody, that was coming out underneath. And it was very much about imminent sense of darkness and thinking about the future and, I guess, you know… it’s got a lot of dread in it, really. And a lot of sort of totally out of control feelings, you know.

I mean, my favourite line in the whole record is the ’genie let out of the bottle’ thing, ’cause that kind of really sums it up for me. It was during the Afghan War, and I was also thinking a lot about that it was the rise of the right. All that stuff about the right in Europe, and in France and, was it Belgium ? I’m not sure, can’t remember now. And that sort of general sense of ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity, and everybody running for cover, which is also, I guess, in my description of ’Backdrifts’ as well.

And we sort of revisited it back in our studio after we’d been in L.A. and after we’d done a lot of live stuff. And it was really refreshing to hear something out of a… you know, we’d done a lot of live stuff, and to hear something that was digital… I remember it was a friday night that we revisited it. It was the end of a session, end of a week, and it another tone, it was another mood. And it was different. It was like ‘we’ve got to make this work in the record’, it takes it to another extreme, in a way.

Jonny : «People have reported feeling unwell and uneasy and unsure listening to it, which is a good rection to get, I think, halfway through a record. I think there’s lots of incertainty on the record lyrically, and that’s one point where the music goes quite unsettling, I think. »

Ed : « It was one of those ones that… when Thom brought ’The Gloaming’ into the… and we heard it on a CD that he presented us with a load of material, before we even started. But it was one of the few tracks, that came from, you know, essentially a laptop. And we sort of revisited it back in our studio after we’d been in L.A. and after we’d done a lot of live stuff. And it was really refreshing to hear something out of a… you know, we’d done a lot of live stuff, and to hear something that was digital… I remember it was a friday night that we revisited it. It was the end of a session, end of a week, and it another tone, it was another mood. And it was different. It was like ’we’ve got to make this work in the record’, it takes it to another extreme, in a way. »

Jonny : « And strangely it was actually put together without computers. It’s all done from, don’t wanna get overly technical, but it was done with pieces of tape. So the rhythms you’re hearing are in a way quite mechanical. So that’s why it’s so unsettling maybe. »

Thom : « Musically that was born out of an experiment that Jonny started, where he wanted to cut… he did it with tape loop. And he wanted to cut it as… on a record, you know, as a locked groove. You know what a locked groove is… so you put one on and rather than the record going to the middle it just stays where it is. And so he sat down with Graeme Stewart, who is another engineer we work with, and basically figured it out. And they… I don’t know what he was gonna use it for, really, but I heard it when he and Colin started working on it, and just thought it was the most amazing thing, that Jonny had ever written. And I just said ’I’ll have that’… and took the hard disc away and… used to drive ’round down country roads during dusk, basically, or the gloaming, listening to this thing, and had this melody, that was coming out underneath. And it was very much about imminent sense of darkness and thinking about the future and, I guess, you know… it’s got a lot of dread in it, really. And a lot of sort of totally out of control feelings, you know. I mean, my favourite line in the whole record is the ’genie let out of the bottle’ thing, ’cause that kind of really sums it up for me. It was during the Afghan War, and I was also thinking a lot about that it was the rise of the right. All that stuff about the right in Europe, and in France and, was it Belgium ? I’m not sure, can’t remember now. And that sort of general sense of ignorance and intolerance and panic and stupidity, and everybody running for cover, which is also, I guess, in my description of ’Backdrifts’ as well. »